"Let me tell you a story about an addict" is what the tag line should be for this movie because Flight, directed by Robert Zemeckis is littered with them. Well not so much as littered with them than about one main one. His name is Captain Whip Whitaker played by Denzel Washington and he is a straight screw up. The man has no redeeming qualities you can see and is a hopeless addict. Hapless however, he is not. In fact, Whip is a man sent from God to save the lives of those on board his plane that suffers a "catastrophic failure" about 30 minutes into it's flight from Orlando to Atlanta. Now I am not the biggest Denzel Washington fan, that's right I said it, to me he's much like Clive Owen, the same guy in every film he's in. There seems to be very little acting done, that being said though I feel this is one of his finer performances to date, right behind his Det. Alonzo Harris from Training Day, his portrayal of Malcolm X, and his Pvt. Trip from Glory. Two of those won him Oscars and the one that didn't, should have.
Denzel shines in the role of the unrepentant Whitaker and when he swills booze from the bottle and sniffs up lines of coke, it's Denzel like you have never seen him. Playing alongside Denzel is a very very talented cast which includes the likes of Don Cheadle who plays Whips lawyer Hugh Lang. I think this is the first time those two men shared the screen together since Don played Mouse and Denzel played Easy in one of my favorite movies, Devil In A Blue Dress. Whips pusher is the charismatic and potentially dangerous Harling Mays played hilariously by John Goodman, yes...THAT John Goodman. There's also Bruce Greenwood, the lovely Tamara Tunie, the Oscar award winning Melissa Leo, and a great turn by Kelly Reilly from Sherlock Holmes fame as Watson's wife who plays the addict Nicole. It's a great cast and a superb movie.
The most magical and riveting moment is when the plane basically falls apart and takes a nose dive for the earth. Now if you've ever been on a plane at one time in your life like I have, I am sure you wondered walking into the plane if you would ever walk off that plane, like I have. That's what makes the sequence of the plane going down so riveting. I don't know how much training Denzel did in flight school or how much he hung out with pilots to get the vernacular down but he was incredible. His performance was so convincing that it almost made you feel, well made me feel that he was a pilot for his day job and did this "acting" thing on the side. It was that good. The secondary story line seemed to be thrown in but it was tied up together brilliantly at the end.
I have always enjoyed Robert Zemeckis' films, he is a very competent and solid director. A bit boring at times but I'll take competent and boring over stupid but exciting any day of the week, especially with how much ticket prices are these days. The look of the film was nothing special except for the crash sequence but it was scored absolutely beautifully by Alan Silvestri. I hated his score for the tepid Avengers movie but he more than makes up for it here. It couldn't have been a finer score written for this movie than the one he penned. All in all I highly recommend Flight, it's absolutely worth the price of admission and I will see you at the theater.
Thanks! We're going to see it tonight.
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